There is something in the work of Donald Taylor and Roberto Chartam that is unsettling to me: it seems that it was about to break, to go to waste, to disappear. I guess that's the thing about playing with the limits and the art of working for days and months in a process that they do not want to leave clues. In the first case, the oil paintings are polished to such an extent that the neophyte in the field could doubt if in reality It is not a watercolor, in his portraits a face (whose contours are blur as if two different vital stages were converging in it) does not seem that face. In the case of Roberto Chartam, the search for basic materials is obsessive (wood, thread, magnets) in order to achieve the boundless task of providing different balances to space, to find a center, invisible until then, by means of parallels and diagonals. Donald Taylor prefers diversity; Roberto Chartam the repetition of series in which, paradoxically, the first will be nothing like the last one: two different ways to get to purity in ways where the least important thing is to arrive but the urgency is to continue. Therefore, that’s why contemporary art is so annoying, because it is an ever-lasting source of processes and processes to eyes generally eager for results. Mythology in literature has it that Lorca, Machado, Baudelaire and, in general, greatest poets of all time, could have up to a hundred versions of the same poem, which was mutating correction after correction, polish after polish, in that eternal insatiableness of the artist to achieve the perfect work. Something similar happens to these two artisans. If you remove yet another layer, there is no painting. If you move away a the magnet an apex, the thread vanishes. From complexity to simplicity, and not the other way around.

No return, but towards the origin.



Fernando Sanchez Calvo

Literature professor

Narcis Monturiol Public Institute